1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to circuit design, and particularly a tool for integrated circuit design, one which can analyze the data contained within an entire endpoint report, compute relationships between paths based on shared segments, and display this information graphically to the designer.
2. Description of Background
When performing timing analysis of paths within chips there often are many hundreds or thousands of paths which fail to meet timing requirements. Many of those failing paths can be related in that a few common segments within them are causing timing failures, and all the rest of the connections within the paths are very close to or meet timing. Unfortunately, a tool does not exist which can find the commonality in failing paths.
Commonly, these paths are reported to users in the form of an Endpoint Report. The Endpoint report is a text based file which contains detailed descriptions of timing test failures. Endpoint reports are very lengthy and verbose, requiring users to scroll horizontally and vertically. They do not group related paths nor identify the overlapping segments within them. There is a lot of information in an endpoint report; so much that often there is too much information for an engineer to comprehend.
One known solution to the problem of having too much information can be found in the Critical Path Chart. This is a chart that graphically represents paths using multiple colors and bars of different length representing logic and wire delay. However, the critical path chart cannot find relationships between failing paths. The graphical representation can hint at the relationships, but the critical path chart does not definitively describe the commonality between them.
A tool is needed which can condense many thousands of failing paths into a concise format which identifies repetition/commonality amongst those paths. Such a tool will save design engineers a lot of time in fixing timing problems by providing insight and priorities for fixing negative slack timing test failures.